View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by RERO DOC Digital Library © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] doi:10.1093/fh/crn046, available online at www.fh.oxfordjournals.org Advance Access published on October 8, 2008 DIVIDED MEMORIES? HISTORICAL CALENDARS, COMMEMORATIVE PROCESSIONS AND THE RECOLLECTION OF THE WARS OF RELIGION DURING THE ANCIEN RÉGIME PHILIP BENEDICT * Abstract — In the centuries that followed the Edict of Nantes, a number of texts and rituals preserved partisan historical recollections of episodes from the Wars of Religion. One important Huguenot ‘ site of memory ’ was the historical calendar. The calendars published between 1590 and 1685 displayed a particular concern with the Wars of Religion, recalling events that illustrated Protestant victimization and Catholic sedition. One important Catholic site of memory was the commemorative procession. Ten or more cities staged annual processions throughout the ancien régime thanking God for delivering them from the violent, sacrilegious Huguenots during the civil wars. If, shortly after the Fronde, you happened to purchase at the temple of Charenton a 1652 edition of the Psalms of David published by Pierre Des-Hayes, you also received at the front of the book a twelve-page historical calendar listing 127 noteworthy events that took place on selected days of the year. 1 Seven of the entries in this calendar came from sacred history and told you such dates as when the tablets of the Law were handed down on Mount Sinai (5 June) or when John the Baptist received the ambassador sent from Jerusalem mentioned in John 1.19 (1 January). Medieval history supplied fourteen events, most of them landmarks of French dynastic history from the accession of Clovis III in 694 to the death of Louis XI in 1483, but also the day on which the Knights Templar had been dissolved in France and that on which Emperor Henry VII had been killed by a poisoned communion wafer fed him by a Dominican— reminders that the seditious and regicidal impulses of the Catholic clergy had not begun * Philip Benedict is Professeur Ordinaire and Director of the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation, University of Geneva. He may be contacted at [email protected] . For encouragement, advice and information invaluable in the preparation of this article, he would like to thank Luc Du- champ, Max Engammare, Nicolas Fornerod, Tom Freeman, Anthony Grafton, Pierre-Olivier Léchot and Stefano Simiz; for critical feedback, Michael Breen, Max Engammare and audiences and col- leagues in Basel, Clermont-Ferrand, York, Leiden and at the 2007 meeting of the Renaissance Soci- ety of America in Miami. 1 Les pseaumes de David , Se vendent à Charenton, Pierre Des-Hayes, 1652. For the complete list of events noted, see the Appendix. My thanks to Max Engammare for providing me with a photo- copy of this calendar. 382 DIVIDED MEMORIES? with the bull Regnans in excelsis or the formation of the Catholic League. Six non-French events of the sixteenth century were deemed worthy of note: the birth of Charles V; the posting of the ninety-five theses; the deaths of Luther and Calvin; the introduction of the Reformation into the Palatinate; in 1559 and the defeat of the Armada. Nineteen events had taken place since the turn of the seventeenth century: the births, deaths, marriages and sacres of successive French monarchs; various victories of French arms; the deaths of Theodore Beza and the duke of Rohan; Maurice of Nassau’s victories at Nieuwpoort and Ostend; the coronation of Frederick of the Palatinate as king of Bohemia and the burning of the Jesuit Mariana’s treatise by order of the Parlement of Paris on 27 June 1614. In sharp contrast with these widely scattered episodes, no less than eighty- one events listed in this historical calendar came from sixteenth-century French history, the great majority of them, as Table 1 shows, from the era of the Wars of Religion. To judge by this calendar, in 1652 the Huguenots still lived in the shadow of the civil wars. The specific events of the Wars of Religion noted in the calendar clustered principally in two periods and combined to suggest a coherent vision of this troubled era. The first cluster of events came from 1559 – 73 and began with the mercurial of the Parlement of Paris in 1559 ‘ to exterminate those of the [Reformed] Religion ’ . Some of the episodes recalled were peaces or parleys at which the Protestants were heard out or were able to win temporary measures of legal toleration, some were important battles or sieges, but no less than nine were reminders that on the date in question ‘ cruel massacres ’ had befallen ‘ the Table 1 Distribution of entries by subject matter and period in seven historical calendars Subject matter 1234567 and period Sacred history 82 (21%) 61 (43%) 48 (66%) 44 (41%) 10 (12%) 7 (6%) 41 (19%) Classical antiquity 79 (20%) 39 (27%) 5 (7%) 3 (3%) 1 (1%) — 32 (15%) Notes on ancient 64 (17%) 20 (14%) 8 (11%) 2 (2%) — — — calendars Early and medieval 1 (1%) 2 (1%) 1 (1%) 1 (1%) 1 (1%) — 10 (5%) church history Profane history, 103 (27%) 18 (14%) 11 (15%) 8 (7%) 7 (8%) 28 (22%) 103 (50%) 400 – 1559 Birth or death days 51 (15%) 3 (2%) — — — — 8 (4%) of learned men French Wars of — 50 (46%) 60 (71%) 73 (57%) 17 (8%) Religion Seventeenth century 6 (7%) 19 (15%) 1 — Paul Eber, Calendarium historicum (Basel, 1550). 2 — Gilbert Cousin, Ephemeris historica (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1551). 3 — Calendrier Historial et Lunaire (Lyon: Gabriel Cotier, 1564). 4 — Pseaumes de David (La Rochelle: H. Haultin, 1590). 5 — Calendrier historial (Geneva: Pierre and Jacques Chouet, 1618). 6 — Les pseaumes de David (Paris: Pierre Des-Hayes, 1652). 7 — Heures à l’usage de Paris (Paris: Jean Le Blanc, 1585). PHILIP BENEDICT 383 faithful ’ . The second, still larger cluster concerned the years from the formation of the Catholic League in March 1585, ‘ on pretext of religion’ , to Henri IV’s triumphant entry into Paris in 1594 and Jean Chastel’s subsequent attempt on his life. In addition to such major episodes of the period as the Day of the Barricades, the killings of the duke and cardinal of Guise (tellingly called ‘ executions ’ ) and the assassination of Henri III, the calendar also noted the adoption of the Edict of Union ‘ for the ruin and extirpation of the Reformed Religion ’ and the Protestant political assembly at La Rochelle convened by the king of Navarre ‘ for the glory of God, the service of the King and the good of the Kingdom ’ . The lynching of the First President of the Parlement of Toulouse Duranti, the arrest of Barnabé Brisson and his fellow parlementaires in Paris and the decree of January 1589, in which the Sorbonistes counselled the French to rebel against Henri III, further reminded readers of the subversive character of the Catholic League and its clerical allies. The exceptional density of events from this period stemmed above all from the recollection of no less than fourteen victories of Henri IV between 1589 and 1594, including his capture of Falaise, Noyon, Vendôme and Le Mans. Finally, the dates throughout the civil wars when such Huguenot paladins as Coligny, two princes of Condé, the duke of Bouillon and François de Châtillon died were also noted. Protestants who looked at this calendar when opening their psalters would have received intermittent reminders throughout the year of the recurrent threats to the survival of the Reformed faith during the civil wars, of the many victories of Henri IV that preserved the cause from extermination, of the great men who had died for the faith and of the seditious behaviour of the Catholic clergy and the Paris Sixteen. The ‘ petit troupeau ’ , threatened with extermination from the beginning, had come through a terrible storm, but just barely. The Wars of Religion cast an entirely different shadow over Besançon, a wholly Catholic city only incorporated into France in 1674. There, every year from 1577 to the end of the ancien régime, the civic authorities and members of the city’s sovereign courts gathered on the morning of 21 June to commemorate what the act of foundation called ‘ the tremendous grace and mercy of God … extended to the city and all its inhabitants … in delivering them from the hostility and fury of the traitors and Huguenots the eternal enemies of this city, who treacherously entered it to take it over and to establish the exercise of their wretched, damnable and condemned new heresy and huguenotical opinion ’ . 2 Wearing their ceremonial robes, the members of the civic elite gathered in the cathedral and bore lighted torches in the wake of the holy sacrament through streets adorned with the richest tapestries of the town to the chapel of the Holy Shroud in the church of Saint-Pierre. There mass was said and a preacher recalled the events of the fateful day in 1575 when a band of exiled Huguenots and their military allies had infiltrated the city and sought to capture it, only to be ‘ chased back out through the bravery of the citizens’ . 3 As crowds of townsfolk for whom 2 A[rchives] C[ommunales] Besançon, BB 36, 20 June 1577, fo. 223v. 3 AC Besançon, BB 173, 21 June 1760, p. 226. 384 DIVIDED MEMORIES? work was suspended for the morning were reminded, the city had escaped conquest and sacrilege, but just barely.